Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

Renchi, in the booklet that collected the paintings from his Michael and Mary Dreaming , the walk to Land’s End, writes of: ‘Son following father/and father following son/a previous time of taller trees/and different animal energies.’ The son smuggles rocks into his father’s rucksack.

Clarence Bicknell travelled to Ceylon at around the time that my great-grandfather, Arthur, was botanising and managing tea plantations. Arthur did not come from a wealthy family. He reveals, in a chapbook (Arthur Sinclair: Planter and Visiting Agent in Ceylon: The Story of his Life and Times as Told by Himself ) published in Colombo in 1900, that his parents ‘were descended from an old Jacobite stock, at this time still rather at a discount’. He walked to school from a ‘little farm-house at King Edward, Aberdeenshire’, carrying the day’s ration of peat. He didn’t linger. ‘I ended my schooling and began my education.’

A self-taught plantsman, he was taken up by Sir John Cheape and shipped off to tea estates near Kandy. He had already laid out a garden of his own, which he rose at four a.m. to work. He was a hungry reader. ‘I read indiscriminately every book in my father’s house… I read and re-read with intense delight.’ He walked home from Aberdeen, ‘sitting down by the wayside’ to dip into whatever he had scavenged from the book stalls. Thomas De Quincey ‘fascinated’ him, and was soon established as his favourite author.

From other books by Arthur Sinclair, accounts of his travels, I remember pen and ink sketches of flowers, more detailed, less painterly than Clarence Bicknell’s. There are photographs of plants, Chuncho chiefs in Peru, artefacts, skulls. Arthur, in his dug-out canoe, rifle across lap, is another Victorian beard. Another quirky traveller, roaming the globe, writing up journals, mythologising, making jokes.

Renchi and I won’t be scrambling over the Andes or discovering rare plants. We have to make do with a few shards of broken Roman pottery in a display case at the Clacket Lane Service Station, or the etymology of the woods we are skirting (‘Devil of Kent’).

Pilgrims Lane, when we blunder across it, is still a buzz. A hedger (human — not one of those grinding machines) puts us right; with his hook, he pulls back a curtain of greenery to gesture at a path across the fields. The road to Westerham dips once again under the M25.

Deep in a bramble thicket that erupts from the edge of the road, Renchi makes his discovery. An antique message printed on tin. Not quite ‘La Via Sacra’ or ‘Le Scale del Paradiso’. A plain, shit-brown rectangle with a prancing white horse: KENT. Welcome.

Westerham, Kent, doesn’t work: not for pedestrians. Or travellers of any kind. Which is strange, because the siphoning of small change from transients, heritage tourists (with an imperialist bias), is the reason for this long shank of a town’s continued existence. Westerham is shaped like a mantrap, narrow jaws sprung against incursions by the unwary. Primed to snap shut with a satisfying crunch.

The predominant colour is chocolate-brown (river mud, Gault clay, shit). Reasons for stopping, detouring, paying your respects to sanctioned real estate, are promoted at every turn in the road. White lettering on a red-brown field: CHARTWELL, HEVER CASTLE, SQUERRYES COURT, QUEBEC HOUSE, THE HIGH WEALD COUNTRY. In Victorian times, London was an occasional destination, over the horizon. A coach operated between the Grasshopper pub (near St Mary’s Church) and Fleet Street. Citizens of substance, men of business, travelled in — when they had to, when it was strictly necessary. Most of the Westerham populace never moved, before trains and metalled roads, more than ten miles from where they were born.

We look for shade beneath a roadside tree, sumach or medlar, while we figure out the quickest means of escape. And, more importantly, somewhere to eat. Dust-free cars are parked, bumper to bumper, along Croydon Road. That name tells you something about Westerham. If you want to head north, the choice is: Croydon or Biggin Hill. Croydon has become a creature of the depths, a subtopian city-state; constantly reaching out to devour the lesser hilltop developments of South London. Croydon has trams and transplanted Docklands towers. Croydon has company HQs, untargeted terror targets (nobody knows they’re there), towers of glass and steel. Croydon has its own suburbs (which house the street-cred TV personality, former footballer, Ian Wright and his family). So Westerham, Kent’s western outrider, gives its allegiance to Croydon, not London.

There are no shops, not yet. No other walkers. There is nobody for the barechested Renchi (blue bandanna, red socks) to interrogate. That eerie sound — like ice breaking — is the M25. It’s always there, barely audible acoustic footsteps, a soothing whisper; a nuisance we have learnt to love. Westerham, with pretensions to a kind of Cotswold status, ignores the interference. Between red brick houses, in narrow gaps, beside pubs clinging to the rumour that James Wolfe once dropped in for a swift half, you catch the glint of transit: Eddie Stobart and his rivals jingling their petty cash, searching for a pound coin with which to pay the Dartford Tunnel toll.

We don’t have outfits appropriate to the Rendezvous cafe-brasserie (‘french, fresh, friendly’). Renchi, in truth, hasn’t much of an outfit left. The Rendezvous is packed, a whirl of activity, punters being turned away. Flocks of OAP anoraks use the place as a tea room: pot of Darjeeling and a pale slice of something that is as close as the French come to seedcake. Local artists (and dressed the part) compete for space with cardiac-flushed antique dealers (with too many shirt buttons undone), and motor racing investors whose round tables clink with empty bottles, mobiles parked like six-guns. The harassed young women who run the orders are the only people under retirement age. Smoke, noise, conviviality: to counter the compulsory siesta under which the rest of the town yawns.

The popularity of the Rendezvous is soon explained: look at the competition. Coaching inns with balconies and blackboards offering specials, such as: NO FOOD, REFURBISHMENT. A ‘picturesque “wood clad” pub dating from the 14th century’ and named, in case you miss the point, GENERAL WOLFE (1727–59). The Kings Arms is the High Street’s flagship property: ‘an elegant Georgian Coaching Inn… for a relaxing lunch or a light snack in the bar or Town Jail’. White in appearance, white in soul. We keep walking.

Down at the George and Dragon, we gnaw through some ploughman’s leftovers. Back in 1883, the George boasted of its proximity to the ‘new South Eastern Railway Station’. Westerham still smelt of hops, the brewery flourished. The old ‘posting house’ catered ‘for Gentlemen especially’, offering ‘Pyramids, Pool and the only Public Billiard Room’ in town. Now the sporting spirit has definitively run out, replaced by dedicated afternoon boozing, history like a puddle of ullage. We grind and gum in a microclimate of stale tobacco, spilt stout and clinical depression.

Making conversation, Renchi asked the girl in the papershop (as we stocked up on chocolate bars and water), how far it was to Chartwell, Winston Churchill’s country place. She couldn’t do distance, miles, metres; didn’t understand the concept. ‘Five minutes,’ she said. ‘Where’s your car parked?’ No car. On foot, walking. She looked blank, couldn’t get her mind around it. ‘Five minutes,’ she repeated. ‘Up past the common. Follow the signs.’

Not today. Not if we’re going to make Otford. Save it. Every charity shop in Kent carries a copy (bottom shelf, cardboard box) of the Pergamon Press Churchill and Chartwell by Robin Fedden. Robert Maxwell, as ever, doing his bit to puff Great Men (Enver Hoxha, Nicolae Ceauşescu). This publication had run through two editions and one revised edition, before the 1974 printing that I acquired in Westerham. It has to be a black propaganda exercise, the dumping of thousands of copies of book ballast — in order to con charity shop vultures into paying £ 11.80 (two adults, non-concessionary) to visit the place Fedden calls ‘the most important country house in Europe’. Nobody but Maxwell could succeed in flogging a book with nothing but a pink chair on the cover; a pink chair with pink box (or footstool) on a strip of grass by a goldfish pond. An image that is meant, emotively, to spell out: absence. A feeble attempt at invoking the famous Churchill icon — © Life — which turns up here as a frontispiece. The warlord, at ease, seen from behind, pregnant with destiny, hat and a coat (no neck); sitting on a rock contemplating the swimming pool he designed and the lake beyond. It could very easily be a stand-in (as with the famous wartime broadcasts), an actor. But it is an effective summary of the man’s relationship to the land, to Kent. After a good lunch, a morning — in bed — dictating memos, he liked to sit by the pond ‘in a simple garden chair’ feeding ‘fat golden orfe’.